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Best Leads In North Port Slaying Came From Victim

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By TODD RUGER and JOHN DAVIS

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: June 11, 2008

SARASOTA COUNTY — One tipster told police Denise Lee's death was a paid hit job.

Others called police proclaiming psychic powers to describe what had happened to Lee or where to find her.

Still others insisted they had details about Michael King's relationship to Lee.

They were wrong. All of them.

Of the nearly 250 leads called in to police after her abduction, the best information came directly from Lee, the daughter of a Charlotte County sheriff's deputy. She managed to call 911 and ask her abductor open-ended questions to help authorities find her.

"She's like, 'I don't know who you are. I don't know, ... where are we?'" a county dispatcher says on a recording. "He said, 'We're a couple streets over from your house. Stop it.'"

The information was included in about 800 records and 13 audio and video recordings released Tuesday in the court case against King, 37, who faces capital murder, rape and kidnapping charges. Lee, 21, was abducted Jan. 17 from her North Port home. Her body was found two days later and six miles away. She left behind a husband and two young boys.

Prosecutors said they plan to ask for the death penalty.

Lee's desperate 6:14 p.m. call, about three hours after she was reported missing, was the first time police knew for sure that she was being held against her will, and it ended when King realized his phone was missing, authorities said.

It was the last time authorities heard her voice. The next day, while searchers were looking for Lee, her father, Rick Goff, urged investigators to bring in King's parents to find out where his daughter was.

"In my heart, maybe I know she's not gonna come home alive," Goff told detectives. "I still love her. I just don't want her in the woods anymore. I just want her home."

Prosecutors have declined to release Lee's 911 call, made during the abduction from what police say was King's cell phone. They say it is exempt from public records laws because King makes statements that are admissions of guilt.

Among the records released Tuesday:

A video of King's house when police first entered on a search warrant showed there was no furniture, the television in the living room was left on and a clock radio on the bedroom floor blared a rock station. Near the radio was a wad of tape that police say contained Lee's hair.

Police records also show an officer visited King in May 2007 after a middle school girl ran home to report a red Corvette following her. The license plate was linked to King. The officer believed King's story that he was looking for real estate.

A woman named Tennille Camp, 32, who said she was King's girlfriend, talked to King on the phone about an hour after Lee was reported missing. King told Camp he was straightening up the garage and asked her to call him back. "I'll call you later," King told Camp, but she never heard back from him.

A man arrested the same night as King and who later shared a jail cell with him told detectives he confronted King about Lee's 911 phone call.

Charles Boggs overheard police scanners and talk of Lee's call, and he said he asked King about it when King was telling him he was a kidnapping victim. King looked shocked, Boggs said.

"He did not realize that phone call was made," Boggs said. Then he said King told him: "Oh, I didn't hear anything."

That call came about the time King had gone to Harold Muxlow's home, about 6 p.m. Jan. 17, some three hours before King was arrested.

King asked Muxlow -- his cousin -- for a shovel, a gas can and a flashlight, which he gave him. But as King was getting back in his car, Lee jumped out of the passenger side door and fought with King for about 30 seconds as Muxlow watched from his driveway, police records state.

A lab has matched King's DNA to DNA found on Lee's body, according to court documents filed by the prosecution.

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